De Achttiende Eeuw 27 (1995) 1
C.P. Courtney,
Reassessing Belle de Zuylen. A historical perspective
No summary available
omhoog
Pierre H. Dubois,
Belle van Zuylen and the Enlightenment
Belle van Zuylen was born into the nobility on 20 October 1740 at Zuylen castle near Utrecht. In European and Dutch society of the time French was widely spoken, being the international language of culture; it is therefore not surprising that she wrote exclusively in French. She owes her reputation to her writings, her character, her ideas and emancipated personality, closely related to the ideas of the Enlightenment. The study of her life and work in the context of the mainstream of Enlightenment culture gives a different picture of Belle van Zuylen than the traditional image she got after her death. On the one hand she has been understood insufficiently in the perspective of the Enlightenment, on the other hand the Enlightenment itself too much with traditional conceptions. This was due to sheer ignorance of texts and documents. The edition of her complete works and letters has led to a total change. The contribution of Belle van Zuylen to the Enlightenment consists of her special attention to the ‘shadowfield’, i.e. the part of human reality upon which reason has no control. In connection herewith her scepticism is a form of critical realism at variance with the scepticism of the Enlightenment philosophers. It does not deal with the doubts of reason about the reliability of traditional knowledge and insights, but with the doubts of the power of reason. Belle believed in life, but not in the natural goodness of man as Rousseau did.
omhoog
Yvette Went-Daoust,
L’oeuvre épistolaire de Mme de Charrière
L’œuvre épistolaire de Belle de Zuylen/Mme de Charrière couvre deux domaines: la correspondance réelle et le roman épistolaire. Or ces deux domaines évoluent parallèlement ; le roman épistolaire ne tire pas seulement sa forme, et jusqu’`a un certain point son style, de la correspondance, il développe des idées et des thèmes que l’on retrouve dans celle-ci.
C’est que Mme de Charrière est avant tout un écrivain qui déverse l’expérience personelle complètement dans l’écriture quel qu’en soit le type. Par ailleurs, la multiplicité des sujets que l’écrivain aborde, et dans sa correspondance et dans son œuvre de fiction, permet de prendre la mesure de l’ampleur de ses champs d’intérêt. Aussi bien les questions qui concernent la personnalité que celles qui touchent à l’organisation sociale, à l’histoire, à la philosophie, à la morale, à l’éducation, au statut des femmes etc. sont pour elle objets d’analyse.
Sur le plan générique, en prolongeant l’écriture de la lettre le roman devient polymorphe car, tout comme son modèle, il met à contribution, tour à tour, le journal intime, la biographie, le dialogue familier ou l’essai. Le passage du premier registre au second va de pair avec la marge de liberté que s’octroie Mme de Charrière vis-à-vis de certaines conventions, à la mode à l’époque, notamment les divers procédés d’authentification des lettres dans le roman. Dans le domaine de l’esthétique, comme dans bien d’autres domaines, Mme de Charrière ne suit pas la mode. La formule de la correspondance appliquée au genre romanesque lui permet surtout de dire ce qu’elle juge important de dire, sans trop s’embarrasser d’une intrique suivie. En d’autres mots, la formule lui permet d’aller à l’essentiel.
omhoog
Joke J. Hermsen,
On Freedom. Belle van Zuylen and the Enlightenment
Belle van Zuylen (1740-1805), outside the Netherlands better known under her married name Mme de Charrière, was an 18th-century Dutch scholar, who reflected in her novels, letters, essays and political pamphlets intensively upon the two most important philosophical issues of the Enlightenment, the principles of freedom, equality and human rights. In her work she shows however that these principles were only applied to a small number of taxpaying, male citizens and that all the other inhabitants of ‘the modern state’ – women, farmers, working class – were excluded from these rights. This articles focusses further on her critical discussions with Rousseau and Kant about the sexual difference issue and ends with some remarks about the relation between freedom, gender and writing.
omhoog
Joris van Eijnatten,
Tragedy of the excessive desire of glory. The ‘philosophical’ background of Bilderdijk’s translation of Oedipus (1779)
During the last decade or so of the eighteenth century, the Dutch poet, dramatist and religious thinker Willem Bilderdijk (1756-1831) experienced a change in outlook and conviction that in both intellectual and literary terms can be described as a shift from Enlightenment to post-Enlightenment or, if one likes, Romantic thought. This article examines a sample of Bilderdijk’s literary output prior to this change. In 1779 the poet published an annotated translation of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex which not only reflected the Enlightened views of its author, but to some extent also indicates the manner in which the author later was able to combine new perspectives and personal idiosyncrasies into a more ‘Romantic’ vision. Resenting the development of eighteenth-century bourgeois drama, Bilderdijk in 1779 advocated a neoclassicist ideal of moral grandeur, noble simplicity, and perfect unity. Also, by concurring with Lessing’s interpretation of Aristotle’s Poetics, the young poet supported the new emphasis on dramatic emotion. Basically, Bilderdijk’s Edipus is very much an Enlightenment text. Middle-of-the-road republican views are put forward and the Greek sense of inexplicable tragedy is rationalized on the basis of an ethic derived from Cicero, Christian Wolff, and Moses Mendelssohn. This eigtheenth-century rendering of Sophocles’ masterpiece thus illustrates an interesting combination of newer literary aims with the rational attitude of an Enlightenment thinker.
omhoog
Karl de Leeuw,
A bookcipher used by Princess Wilhelmina of Prussia during the exile of the Stadholder’s family on Hampton Court
During the 1750s the making of codes and ciphers at the Court of the Princess-Governess Anne and, later on, of Stadholder William V, came into the hands of Pierre Lyonet: a microscopist and talented engraver of insects who was also active as a head of the Dutch Black Chamber. Profiting from his experience as a codebreaker he was able to improve the quality of Dutch codes, but he could not be maintained after the outbreak of the civil war between Patriots and Orangists, because of his strong political views, not favourable to the cause of the House of Orange.
The making of codes and ciphers passed into the hands of the wife of Stadholder William V: Princess Wilhelmina of Prussia. From 1786 onwards, when the Court resided in Nijmegen as a consequence of Patriot take-over in the province of Holland, she handled all volatile correspondence herself and this remained to be the case after the restoration of the Stadholder’s authority in September 1787.
At the beginning she used simple codes and ciphers which were no match for professional cryptanalysts, but they were intended for the encoding or enciphering of information already known to the host governments or for use inside the Dutch Republic only.
These codes and ciphers were no longer thought to be sufficient after the Stadholder and his family were expelled from the Republic by a French occupation army and its Patriot partisans in 1795. They went to England and were lodged in Hampton Court as guests of King George III. The Stadholder and his family, now a liability to their former English and Prussian allies rather than an asset, became politically isolated and could only regain a bargaining position by organizing a war party of their own while cultivating their contacts with the crowned heads of Europe.
Princess Wilhelmina had to construct a new type of cipher, more secure than her former ones, but not more diffcult to operate. She made a small two-part code, consisting of about 300 items in an apparently random alphabetical order, mostly referring to names of places or persons and, to a lesser degree, titles and concepts. The codegroup ranged from 10 to 334, but the one-digit numbers were exclusively used to indicate the position of letters in the words or names in the code-list. Thus new words could be made by adding single digits between dots to codegroups and indicating the end of a word by underlining the last digit. In this way the cipher provided for a great variety of means of representing the letters of the alphabet, while retaining all the advantages of a code that could be memorized.
The construction of this cipher, likely to be the work of the Princess herself, showed a profound understanding of cryptography and innovative capacity in this field as well.
This particular variant of the bookcipher was not described in literature until 14 years later and has to be considered remarkably fit for its use.
omhoog
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